POOL PARTY Issue No. 3

NEWS

To the domain of mood and excess,
primped, pampered, and postured,
both orchestrated and improvised, A who’s who, a what, a where, a how about another?
A strange specificity—fixed by scene, duration, and intent: the party.

Certainly, you’ve been to a few: deliria of protracted ceremony or fervent gesticulations. Too raucous? You might prefer sober discourse, or exclusive weekend excursions. For each preference, by necessity, a setting. Such inevitable spaciality sits comfortably within architecture’s purview: the exchanges between environments and their users only intensify in an event as belaboured as a party.

Yet recall that other, lingering connotation: the party as faction, bounded by identity or ambition rather than time. Quite the opposite of ephemeral, our political groupings emerge from conversations, actions, and interfaces that sustain over days or centuries. What could be gained by allowing these concepts to commingle or contaminate? What violence do we inflict in our celebration? What aesthetics over-determine our political process?

To suffer a definition, a party is a saturation of collective will, whether through trends of urban forms, of financial resources, of community norms, of digital contexts, or still yet of individuals. Though our contemporary parlance assumes frivolity, the power of the group—self-identified, exuberant, and directed—is clear. Ought we take our pleasure a bit more seriously? We seek to dissect the party as a way to bring instrumentality to its clear aspirations—a deconstruction of the extravagant, the intoxicating,

the disorienting, and particularly its very real modes of production. POOL invites the submission of any form of communicative media fit to mingle: illustrations, poems, orthographic drawings, selfies, napkin scribbles, construction documents, contracts, shopping lists, etc.

Rave or riot, gathering or gala—can we use the party to recuperate an architecture of those affective moods we’d prefer to forget?

Submissions for print are due February 18, 2018. All materials should be submitted digitally to pool@aud.ucla.edu